


Doesn't Mean Anything

by howardently



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 07:10:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4426121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howardently/pseuds/howardently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a girl who sits next to him in class that he thinks about more than he should.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doesn't Mean Anything

There’s a girl who sits next to him in class that he thinks about more than he should. He doesn’t know why exactly, what it is about her that sticks in his head, that lingers long after Introduction to Psychology is over. Maybe if they’d had more than just these few of weeks of classes, he’d know better.

As it is now, he thinks it might have something to do with her hair or her tits, both of which are rare and impressive. The hair is long and she’s always shifting it around, pushing it behind her ears or shaking it over her shoulders, or pulling it back into a knot at the base of her neck that she’ll stick a pencil in. The pencil never holds the hair back, really. It’s always spilling out, little loose strands that lie gently against her neck at first, then bigger sections, until she clucks to herself and pulls the pencil out and sticks it between her lips. Not that he watches really, he just notices these things. He always notices things, that’s why he’s studying Psychology.

And the tits, well, he’d have to be a monk not to notice those. Or blind, maybe. He’s pretty sure that he’d still notice them even if he was a monk and have to do extra chants or something as penance. He’s not sure about that either; World Religion isn’t ‘til next term.

She’s always rolling her eyes at the kid in the row in front of them. He thinks about that a fair bit, too. She makes this funny little noise, like a scoff or a huff or something. Sometimes she rolls her eyes so hard that her whole head moves. He thinks to himself one afternoon, quite arbitrarily while he’s trying to study in the library, that she’s  _expansive._  At first he feels a little ashamed, like she could hear the thought from wherever she happened to be on Monday afternoons. She’s a bigger girl, not fat, but not little or skinny like most of the girls he’s dated. But he likes that, likes that she’s got more. He imagines she’s got more in her head than all those other girls too, and she’s definitely got more piss and vinegar in her. He can tell that just from what he’s seen in class, and they’ve never actually spoken to one another.

Well, that’s not exactly true. He did ask to borrow a pen last week. He’d had a pen in his bag; he’d just wanted a reason to talk to her. Wanted to add her voice to the things he can’t quit thinking about. It was stupid, he knows. It’s all so stupid. He doesn’t like her, really. He doesn’t know her, even a little. Just because she wears a fucking awesome Stone Roses shirt and has an Oasis pin on her bag and a picture of Jarvis Cocker on her notebook doesn’t mean he knows anything about her. Doesn’t mean she’s cool. Liking her tits and her shirt and her hair and her rolling eyes doesn’t mean he likes her. And her voice too, he liked that, he guesses. She’d had a vaguely unimpressed tone, and damn if that doesn’t always work for him. Still doesn’t mean he likes her.

He’d rolled his eyes, too, at the twat in front of them. The kid had sodding elbow patches on his jacket, for fuck’s sake. Even Archie would scoff at that, and Archie dresses like an elderly uncle most of the time. But it was that first day of class, and the kid had made this joke about the periodic table that made Finn shake his head. He’d heard a noise and turned to see her rolling her eyes and making a comical gagging face. They’d smiled at each other, shared a moment of condescending amusement. And that was it. The beginning of the end.

Because the twat only got worse with the stupid jokes and annoying comments and lengthy tirades. So he and the girl kept making faces at each other. She’s got this amazing slack jawed, open mouthed, head tilted, eyes rolled back one she makes when the twat is being especially obnoxious. It always makes him smile. She’s better at the faces than he is; he just sort of smiles at her a lot.

She’s got a pretty smile, he notices. He has to earn it though, and he likes that, too. Likes that it’s not just raising an eyebrow at her that causes her to titter. Once, she’d blushed and looked down all cute, but he doesn’t know what he did to earn that one. He thinks it’s fair to speculate about that, it doesn’t mean anything. He’s allowed to wonder what he’s done that’s made a pretty girl blush. Normal, even. Most people do that.

The fourth week of class, someone sat in her normal seat and she’d shifted down the row to the chair right next to his. That was the week he found out that she smells nice, too. Like flowers and summer. She’d stuck right next to him after that, even when she could have returned to her original seat. They say casual hellos and goodbyes. He asks her name, and she tells him it’s Rae. He holds out his hand for a shake at that, and then after class he berates himself for a solid twenty minutes about what an arse he is. Handshakes, fucking hell.

If they were still in college, he’d ask around after her a bit. Slyly, but he’d get the scoop on what her deal was. And then he’d ask her for a drink, and then smoke a lot and not say much and she’d probably snog him in the alley behind the Swann. That’s the way it’d worked for years. But this isn’t college, it’s Uni, and there seems to be a whole different set of rules for how things work here and he hasn’t got a clue what they are. He thinks it involves a lot of discussion, like you have to know stuff to get girls to like you in Uni, and he’s just started and doesn’t know shit yet about the Feminine Mystique or whatever Uni girls care about.

He debates deliberately missing a class so that he could ask to borrow her notes (she always takes a lot of notes, he notices. She likes colorful pens. He uses a No. 2 pencil still, and he feels vaguely embarrassed about it), but he abandons the idea when he realizes it means he’d have to go nearly a week without seeing her. That’s about the time that he gives up the pretense that he doesn’t like her.

Then one day, he sees a notice in the school paper that Ash is playing at a nearby club, and he impulsively buys a pair of tickets. She’s used a logo sticker of them as a bookmark in her Psych book a couple of times. He talks himself through it; he can always take Archie, or his roommate, who frankly could use the musical education. But it’s for her, and he’s somehow got to figure out how to ask her to go when they’ve never exchanged more than a couple of sentences. He carries the tickets in their own pocket in his bag, shoots guilty looks at her because he’s sure she can feel them there, like the heart in the Poe story beating from underneath the floorboards, only this is the music pulsing from behind the zipper.

He doesn’t ask her the first week. But he does make her laugh with a lame joke about Freud’s mum. It’s something, a smart joke for a Uni girl.

She comes in slow the next Tuesday, dark circles making her face seem like it’s all eyes, full of yawns and sleepy smiles. He forces himself not to bounce his knee when she sits next to him, she’d shot him a warning eyebrow raise the last time he’d let his nerves manifest that way. He asks her if she’s had a late night, and she nods, smiling contentedly as she tells him, “Yeah, but a good one. A really good one.”

He nods, but this makes him frown at his desk because she sounds happy. Like, romantically happy. He feels like he can hear Tim Wheeler wailing from the bag he’s shoved beneath his seat.

“With your boyfriend?” He blurts, and Rae rests her chin on her hand and taps her index finger against her earlobe before she answers.

“Nope.” She pops the P, and he smiles. He tells himself it’s not relief, she’s just cute. “No boyfriend.”

“Oh.” He says and bobs his head a couple of times, then silently gives himself a pep talk.  _Ask her, ask her, ask her. Just ask her about music, anything. Open the subject. Lead in slowly._

The twat slides into his seat, jabbering away to a Renfield-type guy who follows him around with a love-struck expression. Finn has a moment of wondering if he looks that way to other people. He swallows. The twat makes a joke and Renfield cackles loudly. Finn offers Rae a comfortable eye roll. She twitches her nose, a small smile curving up one side of her mouth.

“How ‘bout you?” She asks, sitting up and looking down at her notebook. He’s lost and doesn’t answer. She looks up, sly. “You have a girlfriend?”

He’s stunned for a moment, staring openly at her. He’s actually turned in his chair to angle his body at her. She doesn’t turn towards him though, she’s furrowing her brow at the front of the classroom. Finn moves his head to see that the professor is now unloading his stuff at the lectern.

“No.” He says, and tries to shoot a wave of singleness at her. She looks up at him, and her eyes are lidded and warm. He can’t tell if she’s pleased or just sleepy. She just looks at him, blank, and he can’t tell at all what she’s thinking.  _I’m so single._  He beams the thought in her direction.

And then Professor Martins calls the class to order, dimming the lights and flicking the projector on, placing a transparency on top. Rae turns in her seat to face forward, and he lets himself look at her for a couple more seconds before following suit.

He tries to take notes, he really does. He tries to focus on what Martins is saying about the frontal lobe, but the twat and Renfield are giggling, heads tilted towards each other. Finn has a brief but vivid fantasy about smashing them together like two melons, how they’d explode and cover the surrounding students in pulpy goo. He glances over at Rae, notices that she’s laid her head down on the desk, cushioned by her bent arm. He frowns; she must be really tired. She’s not writing anything down.

He focuses. If she’s zoning out, maybe she’ll ask him to borrow his notes and they can go to his room together so she can copy them and then he can offer to let her nap in his bed and then she’ll wake up sleepy and grateful and then he can tell her about the Ash gig. He writes a lot of notes for about twenty minutes, and then her elbow nudges his notebook and he looks down to see that she’s fallen asleep and relaxed over the invisible line between their spaces so that she’s right next to him. Her hair is only a couple of inches away from his arm.

Her hair is only a couple of inches away from his arm.

No, he can’t. That would be weird. Really weird. They’re not even really friends, barely acquaintances. And if he wants to be more, if he wants to be, well, anything, he can’t go around petting her hair when she’s fallen asleep. He feels gross even considering it.

He hunches over the tabletop a little bit, curls his arm further away from her. She makes a soft mumble in her sleep, and he watches her back rise and fall evenly from over the top of his pencil. He looks down to see that his notes have devolved into a jagged line angling down the paper. He frowns. She smells really nice. It occurs to him that it’s her hair that contains the smell, that her hair is the source of her powers. He scrubs at his face and tries to concentrate.

The frontal lobe is responsible for attention span and it contains the reward centers of the brain. That’s ironic. He glances over again. Her hair reflects the muted light from overhead. If he shifts his head around a little, it makes a kind of light show. His fingers feel itchy, tight and strange. He puts his pencil down, flexes his fingers. He leans back in his chair.

 _Don’t do it._ He tells himself firmly. It’s  _fucking weird, she’s not going to go out with a weirdo. Don’t do it._

He looks around guiltily, but everyone is riveted by the lecture. He glances up and sees a picture of a brain on the screen. He does it.

It’s just the barest brush of his fingertips. He starts around the base of her skull and just skims his fingers along the sweep of hair over her back. It’s so soft, so smooth, so silky. He can hear himself making an approving noise, or what he hopes is an approving noise rather than an aroused one. He does it again. A little further up, almost the crown of her head, all the way to where the tips rest over her red flannel shirt. It’s so pretty, the red and the black. The shininess. Again.

It’s a little bit more pressure, just a tiny bit. He really really doesn’t want to wake her, doesn’t want to get caught doing this. But he also really really wants to wind more of her hair between his fingers, feel the drag and pull as it slips over his knuckles. He’ll settle for just a bit more of his fingertips.

He glances around again, shifty and awkward. He watches Martins point to different parts of the giant projected brain with the giant shadow of his pen. He lets his palm join in the hair petting, hums under his breath at the way her hair feels like satin under his hand. He sighs. He’s a bit sleepy himself, and the dimness of the room combined with Rae’s even breaths make him feel warm and peaceful and drifty. He watches the pen shadow shift, lets his hand smooth, feels his heart beat slowly.

And then the lights flick on, and Rae snaps up to a sitting position. Finn snatches his hand back as fast as he can, but he’s not sure she doesn’t see it anyway. He picks up his pencil and scribbles a line of nonsense at the bottom of his useless notes, shuts the cover firmly and deliberately. He stares hard at his desk, aware of every single movement of her beside him, every single minute movement of his own body.

When he’s shut his notebook and carefully stacked it on top of his textbook, he turns to shoot her a careful smile. She’s biting her lip, staring a bit dazedly down at her blank notes. He takes a deep breath as quietly as he can, heart racing.

“Did you…” Rae asks, a bewildered frown on her face as she looks over at him.

“No.” He replies, too quick, too guilty.

She pulls her head back on her neck, eyes him with her face tilted upwards. The classroom is emptying and he’d normally be putting his stuff away and queuing up with the rest to exit, but he’s frozen. He curses himself internally.

“Were you…” She squints and blows out a gust of air.  There’s a red mark on her cheek from the edge of her notebook. “Were you touching my hair just now?”

He scratches the back of his neck, pulls his bag onto his lap and shoves things into it haphazardly so he doesn’t have to look at her. “Dunno what you mean.”

“Huh.” She mumbles, and he glances up at her but keeps his head down. She’s gathering her hair into a clump over one shoulder and twisting it. His fingers twitch. “That would be strange. If you were, I mean.”

“I wasn’t, so…” He’s strangely belligerent; he can feel his jaw jutting out. He’s going to be agonizing about this for weeks, he can tell. He can never ask her to the gig now. He probably can never talk to her again at all. She’ll move to the other side of the room next class, he knows it.

Rae frowns and looks at him askance. “Ooookaaaay.” She grabs her books and stands. “I’ll see you on Thursday, then, I guess.”

He bobs his head stupidly without looking at her. His chin is all tight, lips flat. He feels like an idiot. It can’t get worse than this.

 _It can’t get worse than this._  He thinks, and then he stands and half-jogs after her. She’s only a couple of steps ahead, at the end of the aisle, but she’s about to walk out the door. They’re the last two in the room, even the professor has left.

“Wait, Rae!” He calls, and it’s too loud. It’s too much, far too much for how casually they know each other and especially for how uncomfortable this encounter has been.  _It can’t get any worse,_ he reminds himself.

She turns around, hand on the door handle. She squints at him, tilts her head to the side.

“I, um.” He swallows. She’s tugging on her hair where it hangs over her shoulder. “You’re tired, right? Uh, maybe… Coffee?” He chokes a bit on the last word, coughs into his fist. She’s smiling at him, a mysterious curve of her lips that doesn’t give anything away. He tries again. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

She bites her lip for a minute and considers him, then shrugs. “Yeah, alright.”

He looks down to hide his smile, but it’s still there when he makes it to the door and he’s sure she sees it anyway. He runs his hand over the small pocket where the tickets hide, takes it away to hold open the door for her. He’ll get to that, there’s still time.

At the coffee shop, he’ll touch her cheek where the red mark is slowly fading, and she’ll be the one to blush and duck her face. On Thursday, he comes in to find her sitting in the usual spot. She grins at him as he sits beside her, and he touches Jarvis’s t-shirt with his forefinger, casual as can be, and asks her if she likes Pulp.


End file.
